Will NetApp's 28 character license keys(aka, legacy licenses) be discontinued this year?

Zhihui

Will NetApp's 28 character license keys(aka, legacy licenses) be discontinued this year? Thank you.

AlexDawson

There is no public announcement about dropping support for 28 character license keys, and I personally doubt it'll happen in the next 5 years.

There's two reasons I think that is the case:

1. The FAS2750 - it runs every version of ONTAP from 9.4 onwards, and is still being sold, meaning it still probably (based on my reading of our historic practices) still has at least 3 years of ONTAP releases left (maybe more), and while that system is out in the field, we will have to either support 28 character licenses in newer versions of ONTAP or come up with a process to replace them with NLFs
2. Replacement Motherboards - hardware fails periodically, and our support process is engineered to send out new licenses as 28 character codes with new motherboards, not NLFs.

Neither of these is an impossible problem to solve, but any developer organisation has to prioritise their efforts, and this would be a large cross functional project that doesn't really solve a big problem, so it would be on the backburner, to my thinking.